Iconology 3.0 Image Theory from Antiquity to the Present by Prof. W.J.T Mitchell

What is an image and what does it want from us? In this Literary Lecture Series talk, art historian W.J.T. Mitchell builds a theory of the image from the ground up: from Peirce's distinction between icon, symbol, and index, through Plato's cave, the wars over idolatry, and the doubleness that makes every picture at once a real thing and an illusion. He then turns to vision itself, seeing and being seen, and to a deceptively simple question: how many fundamental kinds of media are there? His answer, drawn across Aristotle, Saussure, Lacan, and Kittler, is three: image, music, and text. The lecture closes on the future of the image in the age of AI, synthetic faces of no one, the robot as a new "alien intelligence" of our own making, and the choice Mitchell poses between treating it as an instrument of deception or as a "companion species" that might help us think. The discussion that follows runs long and wide, taking up iconoclasm and economics, affect, perception and language, and the iconography of power. W.J.T. Mitchell is a theorist of images and visual culture at the University of Chicago, longtime editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, and author of Iconology, Picture Theory, and What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Recorded 20 April 2026 · Delivered online for Scribe, the Literary Society of Hindu College, University of Delhi.